I have received an abundance of comments relating to my wobbly camera. I have recently started KZfaq and have only just acquired a proper camera stand. This is now implemented in all my future videos.

We got physics sorcerer right here

I loved this book as a freshman in 8.012 at MIT. I have borrowed problems from it for my own classes at Valparaiso University. The foreword has a great phrase attributed to Piet Hein: “Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back”. 😂👍

At Texas A&M, we have a pair of introductory physics courses (PHYS 206 and 207) where the textbook is titled Don't Panic. The reasoning behind this, according to the author, physics professor Dr. Bill Bassichis, is that when he was in college, the physics textbook he got was titled Physics: An Introductory Course. You can see how that got abbreviated to PANIC.

Though I'm a mathematics student but I'm happy that there are so many channels coming out on KZfaq where they talk about good books and how they started their journey.

While studying math/cs we used to make the joke that "An Introduction to… " in context of math/cs means "this is all we curently know about this subject" whereas it means something very different elsewhere in science

I took the AP physics classes in high school but this textbook was what we used for our Honors Introduction sequence in freshman year of college. That was essentially our first introduction to physics. It was certainly a tough journey but it indeed was a good textbook.

I think people mistake "introduction" for "easy", and that's why they get tripped up by a book like this. Really, "introduction" is textbook-lingo for "self-contained". It contains all subject-relevant info needed to understand from ground zero. This means that the mechanics concepts are built up from scratch in this book, but the same is not necessarily true about the mathematics. It might give a quick brush on concepts of vector algebra, multivariate calculus, and differential equations as they come up, but there are separate texts for that information if you want a formal introduction. I think the issue is that this book is used with students who are still learning univariate calculus, and so less a problem with the book or the physics curriculum itself, but instead the interaction between the physics and math curricula.

We used this book at Cornell. This book/course made me switch my major to math. I still have this book and would one day like to revisit it in less stressful environment.

You should see Landau and Lifshitz. Jumps immediately into Lagrangian mechanics as the starting point.

We used K&K for honors freshman mechanics here at UPenn, and I thought it was great! Definitely worth biting the bullet freshman year and going for the more rigorous mathematical approach. Made Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics very approachable when I got to Taylor's book.

I was MIT class of '76. I took 8.01 (the standard first-semester physics course) and I am SO glad that we didn't use that book. I had enough trouble with vectors as it was.

I also used this book too when i did my first mechanics class! ❤ Indeed if there is no prior experience in physics, this book is awfully hard. But otherwise it is an excellent bridge to the next analytical mechanics course using Marion, or more modern books like Hamill or Hand because all the calculus related skills are well practiced in this book. The exercises in this book are much more thought provoking too. 😊

As a physicist, I really like K&K more and more with age. As an undergraduate, I hated the book because the problems were fucking hard (and I had a terrible instructor to boot). But when tutoring for courses as a graduate student, I started to really like the book. And now as a postdoc, this is a nice summer/holiday read.

When I took 8.012, we used the excellent Newtonian Mechanics, by Tony French. The lecturer was Ray Weiss.

As an engineer, I have to say that this book does what its title says. It's not so much that it needs prior physics, but it really assumes a thorough grasp of advanced mathematics.

Reading this book before taking a freshman physics/calc sequence made it a difficult read. I feel like having a thorough background in trig helps tremendously, as many solutions become vastly simplified. I recall working on one exercise that took me awhile to understand the solution to, but one student showed me a solution using trig identities and solved it in a fraction of the time. I study chemistry, so I'm glad I don't have to return to this quite frankly, haha.

I'm going back to solve a lot of the problems at the moment and i've found a fair few of the problems aren't actually hard as such but they're just maddeningly open to interpretation and sometimes poorly posed where you dont know from the phrasing what assumptions you can or can't make. It explains to some extent why I had issues with its problems in the past. Other than that, the questions are good but generally doable.

The topics covered by this book, plus thermodynamics, were all part of the first year course in Physics here in Italy about 25 years ago. That was before the introduction of the Bologna Process 3+2 years higher education format; I don't know if it's still the same nowadays. The course was about 7-8 months long and it was very complete. Topics like rotating frames of reference, the usage of polar coordinates, detailed description of the motion of rigid bodies (Euler equations of motions and the like), the harmonic oscillator and the decomposition into normal modes were all considered a standard part of a first year physics student education. The course being a whole package, there was no distinction between introductory or non-introductory. And indeed the attrition rate was pretty high: university freshmen were confronted with the full package and they had to "learn to swim or drown".

In my country we use this book for preparing for high school physics Olympiad really good book with great problems(Along with David morin and Resnick Halliday Krane)

This book along with IE Irodov's Introduction to Mechanics were like my favorite during my high school.

I have been eagerly watching your reviews. A topic I would like you cover, if you would be so inclined, is what texts are best at covering Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics. Thank you for the quality reviews!

Believe it or not, this book helped me passed General Physics 1 in Undergrad. Please review Classical Mechanics by Goldstein

This is great! You have a very good page-turning technique, and your camera is excellent as capturing the perfect page-turning noise very well! Surprised you don’t have more subscribers

In the College of Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, they used a text by J.L. Meriam for a two course sequence in Classical (or Newtonian) Mechanics. I believe the title in the 1960s (when my father took the sequence) was, “Statics and Dynamics.” At that time the textbook may have been priced between $5 and $10. Definitely not more than $15. In 1989 (when I took the course sequence), they used an updated version of the same textbook that employed both SI and Imperial British units of measure that had been split up into two volumes costing about $70 apiece. So, a 10 fold increase in the cost over about a 25 year period. Growing up as a child, I had perused my father’s older edition of the textbook with a kind of mesmerized amazement at the derivative and integral symbols and wondered what kind of mathematics employed them. Many of the problems were the same in the newer edition except that they used only Imperial British units in the 60s. In 1989, incoming engineering Freshman students were confronted by this two course sequence heavily laden with real-world mechanics problems. Many students (more than half) simply changed their major after the first semester of statics (all objects at rest so that summation of forces in each of the three physical dimensions is zero). The statics course sections would typically be held in large lecture halls holding about 150 seats. The latter course, dynamics, would be held in smaller more traditional classrooms with only maybe 35 seats. I took both after having the benefit of a years of Calculus, thank Gawd! And, I also had the benefit of a year’s worth of Physics during high school. I think the thing that caused the most difficulty for students was a failure to learn how to draw a “free-body” diagram and properly represent all of the forces involved (including action-reaction pairs). I had missed a problem on our HS physics exam asking if the principal of our school weighed 200 lbm (at the surface), indicating that the earth pulled downward on him with a force vector of -200 lbs, what force then did the principal exert upon the earth? Never again forgot to take Newton’s 3rd Law into consideration.

You made remembered my 2nd year when I was studying physics in Colombia. Very good times spent with friends trying to solve the problems. Unfortunately, we had a tutor who didn't know how to solve the problems, she only revised a solutions manual :(. Also it was hard because of the barrier of the language.

I was assigned this textbook @ the Univ. of Michigan in Honors Physics as a freshman. It ended my cockiness.

We used K&K for our introductory mechanics courses at UCSB. The problems were honestly quite enlightening and really forced you to be smart with actually making use of the conservation laws and other useful theorems.

I love Landau and Lifshitz vol 1 Mechanics: the only mechanics book I’ve seen that doesn’t even talk about forces and derives everything from scratch using only the Lagrangian

Thank you for the review, and for informing us that a 2nd edition exists. I completed school about 30 years ago. I'm going to purchase a copy hoping it will serve as a reintroduction to forgotten information.

We used this textbook in freshman mechanics at IIT Bombay - we were engg majors and not physics majors. Most incoming freshman had a good grasp of mechanics since they had studied for the notorious JEE examination as another commenter talks about. This was a far more rigorous formulation than what our incoming knowhow was. I recall really enjoying this book - in particular a problem about a race car that revolves in a pit that was a paraboloid of revolution… good old days!

Great review. I am planning to get it for self-study. Thanks for sharing. Quick question, what is the timer you have? I might be interested in getting one to keep focus on my study. Thank you!!

The GOAT intro physics text book. Although it doesn't cover as mamy topics as some other books like Morin and Goldstein, the manner in which the theory and examples are presented was very digestible and atttactive (to me). I like that it is more rigorous than some books like Halliday-Resnick or Sears-Zemansky. Our first semester physics prof completely blew the opportunity to make most of this book, but I read it during high school, just out of interest, during my JEE prep, and I found it to be a very beautiful experience. I'll always have a special place for it in my heart, because it was my first physics text book.

Thanks for the review! I never read this one, but just seeing your video it looks a little bit like a condensed version of the "Classical Mechanics" book by Taylor. I like the Taylor book a lot and worked through two thirds of it at some point (with nearly all of the exercises), but it is quite a thick book. So this may be a good alternative for some people.

This is an excellent book. The book I loved is Analytical Mechanics by Hand and Finch. It is somewhat of Goldstein's standard. After finishing these two books every keen learner would have to work thru Mechanics by Landau and Lifshitz

The book looks awesome in hardcover I have one in paperback.

“Mechanics for Masochists” LOL😂. I was subjected to a similar textbook with the same format, topics, including the same title as a young physics major many, many years ago. This was my first class after the normal 3 semester entry level classes as my university. Rigorous indeed! Very, very tough even for those with solid math backgrounds. Definitely NOT an “introductory” text.

Hi, I'd like to ask how does it compare with University Physics by Sears and Zemansky? The latest editions of Sears and Zemansky requires some basic understanding of Line Integrals and some vector calculus (though not much). I studied the book together with The Calculus 7 by Leithold. Thanks

Had this book in my freshman year at BITS. It's really fun(in a challenging way) if you like physics.

i kept pausing to get a better look at the table of contents and it seems like this particular text omits lagrangian/hamiltonian mechanics; is this an intro or upper level undergrad book? when i was an undergrad we used marion/thornton's classical dynamics. absolutely fucking brutal at the time, but i started really appreciating it when i got to grad school. classical mechanics is criminally underrated, it's become my favorite branch of physics in recent times.

It is an intro mechanics text -- no mention of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations. The classification of classical mechanics texts is simple: if no coverage of Lagrangians and Hamiltonians, it's introductory; if there is coverage of Lagrangians and Hamiltonians later in the text, it''s intermediate (junior/senior level); and if it starts with Lagrangians and Hamiltonians (like Goldstein or Landau and Lifshitz) it's graduate level.

I think this book goes well with mit course classical mechanics 8.01sc fell 2016 for undergrad, it's a course for newtonian formalism only .

If i remembered right, there’s a classical mechanism problem where the ans involved sqrt(17). I got this ans lot of hard work and the prof didn’t even care to check my derivation. He knew i got it right ‘cos he saw sqrt(17) there.

I'm beginning my bachelors in physics at Cornell in the fall and we have the same introductory physics sequence-we use the same book! Quite interesting!

The real infamous text book is "Classical Electrodynamics" by Jackson.

A student should get that book and the course material ahead of the start of class and work through it during the summer break; then, he/she will be prepared to succeed.

A good book to read to avoid demetia.

Excellent job

This is a very nice book; one of the gems. In my engineering freshman year, we have used, then kind of a standard, Fundamentals of Physics (Halliday-Resnick) which imho is actually a very nice commercial-product for academic consumers, terefore for my scientific-pleasure, I've also followed Ohanian's Physics which I think represents one of the best, most elegant, books ever written on any topic: a must read for true science-lovers. However, despite being bewilderingly typed and illustrated, complete in its coverege, and exceptionally successful in its exposition of subjects, the level of treatment is limited to *scientifically serious freshman* only. Now, if anyone wants to improve his skills at "Mechanics" beyond this, then the Kleppner's "An Introduction to (advanced) Mechanics" imho is the best following book between a first year freshman and a more mature classical mechanics course book. That being said, it still makes use of student intuition to clarify its concepts which makes it much accessible than the subsequent theoretical course books. And that makes it a highly readable one. I enjoyed reading it, especially its final four chapters (1st edition) on Theory of Special Relativity is much clearer and satisfying than many other "modern physics" books out there. Note: interestingly, those last-four chapters do not depend on the prior ten chapters at a level more than they are presented in a freshmen treatment, and therefore they can be read immediately for anyone completed a freshman physics course, and interested in having a rigourous and accurate understanding of STR.

This is a very good mechanics book, suitable for some one who has read Resnick and Halliday.

Was my intro Physics class at JHU in the late 70's. This book saved my GPA - made everything superclear. I didn't have a great high school physics class. Not sure about the whole thesis of this video.

Did they ever fix the incorrect hint for the trash can over the geyser problem, that was in the first edition?

I had Den Hartog's Mechanics which taught a "particle" in the radial slot of a rotating disk moved out at a constant velocity. I disagreed thinking if it gets going from v = 0 it will continue to accelerate radially. I did an experiment that showed this. The curve is exponential not Archemedian.

Got a first edition copy of this from a used bookstore. Best use of my 9 bucks ever.

Not a physics major, but I do know enough physics to say that if I had needed to prop up a broken leg of a dresser in a college dorm room, this book looks like it could easily serve as the foundation for that.

Nice reference, thanks !

thsnks will be owner of new book soon

Any chance for review of Landau-Lifshitz Course of Theoretical Physics?

I recall another similar, very hard textbook about mechanics from my own schooldays; "A Course In Applied Mathematics", by D F Lawden.

Please do more videos on physics textbooks

Cool. Thanks for sharing.

Anyone have experience with both this book and the Landau-Livschitz Mechanics textbook? What are your thoughts on the two?

When he mentions the vectors, I had flashbacks from taking dynamics.

I wonder on what the content of the continuation could be .. Advanced Mechanics 🤔

I've never had a class that covered every topic in the book, there were always more complicated topics that were left out due to time constraints.

How do you study a textbook as a self taught physicist? I am also trying to learn undergraduate physics by my own and whenever i am stuck i cannot ask a professor or teacher for the insight. What do you do when you get stuck on a problem for long.?

This was my MOW textbook in my freshman year in BITS Pilani and I went felt like it was very much an extension to my highschool CBSE. I did all those book back exercises in that textbook lol.

We used this for freshman physics at the University of Chicago, as well.

Please do physics from start to end. I am trying to self study physics this summer vacation. It will be a helpful for everyone.

Excellent. I'll purchase this text and put it right next to my Harry Potter editions for some nightly, light, reading.

I think I got mine when it was thick xeroxed set of pages handed out in the MIT Physics office about 1989

I need a book like that, but with ALL the answers in the back, and MANY worked solutions for many of them as well. When self studying, it's ok to se the answers and have numerous worked examples for when you get stuck. If you're truly interested in self learning, you wont cheat by looking, you'll actually try to solve them before looking, and then figuring out where you went wrong. when you lack someone to help you, you NEED SOLVED EXAMPLES!!!!!!!!!! I have helped a great many people using worked examples, often using my work or their attempts as my worked problems. I have a whole process to helping people learn to not fear math and figure out how to get good at it. but I'm also Not a mathematician or physicist that does problems all day long, and so I need refreshers too. I need books to help refresh myself at times. Sometimes it can be years between practice, and you forget a lot.

I would love to see a video going by "Book order to learn physics from start to finish".

It's natural that best universities, such as MIT, choose to use more advanced courses. In MIPT, the best Russian university for physics, we used Mechanics by Prof. Sivukhin, volume one of his fundamental five-volume course on general physics, two times thicker than this book. It included more or less same topics as in this book, but on top of that fluid motion, stress tensor and other advanced topics. It was a hard work, very hard work, but at the end that made you a top-level physicist.

"Introduction to mechanics" 500 pages the book basically describes all of solid mechanics thank you MIT very cool

I don't know, I think going into things like the Lorentz transformation and special relativity may be hurtful to first year Phys students that are starting with mechanics. The notes on differentials and stuff would be beneficial though as I feel most first year students know nothing about them despite using them, albeit elementarily. I just finished a course on special and general relativity and it was honestly very challenging when it came to Lorentz transformation and proving invariance. This does not seem like something that classical mechanics or even classical electromagnetic students need to deal with. I think these topics may be better left for a dedicated course.

It was a nice book I read by my own, untill it got to chapter 9. Taught me more maths than physics

@Self-TaughtPhysicist where can I buy this book ?

Honestly will have to check this out. Doesn't seem too bad tbh

please give the pdf of this book

The contents seem to me to be very appropriate for an introductory course to mechanics. It is reasonable to have some basic physics background if you intend to tackle mechanics. Almost 50 years ago, we took Goldstein's Classical Mechanics as the textbook for a second course in mechanics, introducing Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations. I admit I struggled with this. Yet, an introductory text (such as K&K) that avoids these formulations and is elegantly presented seems appropriate. I wish I had K&K to give me a solid grounding. For masochists? Come on! You need to have some background in physics and calculus if you are half serious about mechanics ...

This does not contain Hamiltonian mechanics where should I read it??

I can't do calculus. Makes me ineligible for anything until I can. What gets me is that I once could. Differentiate and Integrate. Simply. Granted, simply. But I understood the notion. I was studying by correspondence Engineering Surveying with the NSW Tafe and as part of this course came this intro to calculus. And that intro had me, just on the strength of two or three lesson papers delivered weekly or bi weekly, calculating all kinds of weird things via calculus. Extracting roots I think I remember. Calculating volumes of course - the surveying aspect. But firmly understanding the notion of rate of change of rate of change and able to apply it in all kinds of uninstinctive areas. Years later after it was long forgotten I tried to relearn. And I looked here and there and everywhere. In these latter years on the web. YT vids and everything. Downloaded books. Everyone claims to 'make it easy'. What's that online school thing that kinda makes itself out to be the best of the best? Khan academy I think? None of them, including it, could get it back into me. Despite them all using far more words than were ever used by that anonymous (today, sadly, can't get a line on him anyway I try) teacher way back then. Khan academy being the worst, not the best. They had me going back to almost the very beginning of mathematics and wanted to cover every possible thing on the way there... I tell this anecdote just because this thing prompted it... such things always prompt a similar reaction - 'outburst' - from me. Perhaps of some interest to some, of itself. But also perhaps in some hope of finding some person/s who have some insight into this 'obfuscation of a simple thing', which is what I now see it as. Else how could he have got it through to me so well, so rapidly, so easily? So I'll look at this 'A quick calculus, a self teaching guide' that this book here suggests will provide the necessary calculus. :)

Hi.. Is there any book for electric circuit analysis with that level of toughness.

How much does this text differ from Introduction to Classical Mechanics by David Morin? which is also a Cambridge text

I've heard of unboxings, but this unbooking is a first for me

Nothing comes close to any book in level of difficulty than any book authored by Timoshenko. The phrase of his that I came to dread was: "It is left to the student to derive ...". And actually, I think this course is pretty easy as at Georgia Tech, what is covered by one required course at MIT is covered in about four different required courses. So significantly more depth and excruciating assignments and tests.

Can I get a pdf of this book (from India)

Ah, introduction book has literal rocket science

How about buying a camera stand?

I would like to acquire it. How can I get one unit?

Personally, as a maths major, I think that it’s sort of cruel for physics majors are introduced to physics without a more complete understanding of calculus. Rarely do introducton to mechanics classes seem to expect calculus I - [limits, derivatives, and antiderivatives] and introdutory E&M classes don’t often require more than calculus II [techniques of integration, series]. While this is the bare minimum for both classes it doesn’t make clear the depth that an understanding in difeq and multivariable calculus can provide.

I temember the “Shorter Oxford Dictionary” was a weighty tome.

"Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back!"

I recommend solving I E Erodove if you want a challanging set of problems

Why is left side margin so large?

How about CIG Mechanics? Anyone wish to explore?

Despite the name, most students who take the course for which this book was written are not in their first exposure to mechanics. They will likely have had both good physics and good calculus classes in high school. The authors mention in the preface that this is the usual level of preparation. A book that is similar in sophistication was Fundamental University Physics, volume 1 by Marcelo Alonso and Edward Finn. It's at the same level, but the K&K book has harder problems. The vast majority of them do not have an obvious path to a solution. I think Alonso and Finn is better at actually *teaching* physics, and it is a better book than this for starting from the beginning. Also there are still many problems in it that are much more difficult than what you find in a "mainstream" introductory physics book. For instance, there is a problem asking the reader to find the Lorentz transformation for a general direction of relative motion using dot products for both velocity *and* acceleration. There's a problem to find expressions for products of inertia. There are even questions on fluid mechanics where the reader is asked to determine the vector form in 3 dimensions for the equation of motion for fluids and another to find what Bernoulli's theorem becomes in the case of a fluid that is compressible. Just great stuff. It's a real shame they were allowed to go out of print. The second and third volumes are head-and-shoulders above other offerings for electromagnetism and "modern physics." The big book that's just called "Physics" by the same authors is not as good--just another bland and uninspiring physics book among many. I actually find the coverage in K&K of the topics that appear in it but not in many other "intro" books to be pretty bad. I think the way they address Euler's equation is abysmal. The chapters on special relativity are basically unchanged from the 50+-year-old first edition despite pedagogical developments in teaching it. The lectures and recitation sessions for the actual course are probably the secret sauce to really getting the most out of this book.

Seems like an undergrad CM book. No Lagrangians or Hamiltonians or Hamilton-Jacobi equation per the index

I have this book, I used it to teach introductory classical mechanics for physics sophomores....excellent book!